musings

Tag Archives: family

Not long ago, I found a letter that my dad wrote to me in April, 1987. The reason for the letter was my high school senior retreat day at Padua High School. It was a beautiful surprise to see my dad’s handwriting again, all confident, cheerful and scrawly, and to “hear” his voice again in those words. When I saved this letter and put it away, I’m sure I never gave his words another thought. The thing is, though, I didn’t have to remember his words, because every single day, he told me the same things in his actions. It amazes me how much his own words mirror the words I used later in his eulogy to describe him and his life. This is vintage Hap, solid advice! And it reminds me that while we may think the most important thing we can say to someone while they’re here is “I love you,” the greater gift may be to say, “I know that you love me.” The letter is pictured here, but difficult to read, so I will transcribe his words: (spoiler alert!! He spills the “secret of life.”)

Mary Beth,

Time for our Father Daughter talk! (Equal billing)

Mary, the whole world is yours if you shut out the negatives. Don’t think the bad of anything. Enjoy your work–your school, now or ever. Please try & be happy with any situation you’re in. I know it sounds stupid but you can make or train yourself to accept & enjoy all challenges. It’s never too hot, too cold, too far, too anything. Don’t be afraid to reach out. I enjoy you & I love you & I want you to be a doer. Mary, honest, the secret of life is to love man and God, don’t dislike, nothing is worth the emotion of hate. I tease you about your loving me. I know you do. I get a lot of mileage out of teasing you about it. It’s really more important to me to know that I love you. You & your sisters have always thought of me & are nice to me, you all know I loved you. What I really want you to realize is how special Dolores Mae is. None of us can comprehend how much she loves. The nicest thing you can ever do for me is to treat mom as the special person she is. Then treat yourself as the special person you are. Reach out & enjoy. Please care enough about the people you know & live with to be a positive influence on their lives. I truly believe you are special. Take whatever school or job you may & love it & enjoy it until the next one. Try to enjoy everything & every one. I wish I had realized much earlier in life how special the gifts of God are. End of lecture. I love you. I will never not love you. -Hap

Funny, when I started this blog years ago I used the word “musings” to describe it, but I’m not sure I have done that at all. I think I tend to use Facebook for my musings, Twitter for my criticism (most people I know in my age group and older are on Facebook so I can be meaner on Twitter and still not blow my cover), and Snapchat for…well, snapchat.

I avoid writing unless I feel I have the time and inspiration for a full, concise essay with a message and hook and an ending. Why? No one sees this anyway, for the most part! So I’m gonna MUSE!

Yesterday evening, I realized as I stood in line for fresh peach ice cream, a seasonal offering at Mitchells, that at that very moment when my husband and I were capping off a long day of sun, food, and cocktails in the searing late summer Sunday heat, a boy I went to high school with–and with whom my husband would eventually cross office space with–was sitting at a service to bury his 19-year old son who had committed suicide. We had visited with the family at the wake earlier in the day, not knowing what to do or say besides a hug, tears, and the promise of prayers. Being thankful for our mental health and that of our children, my husband and I, murmuring taboo words about what life would be like for this family now that every day would cease to be about managing the lifelong depression and emotional chaos of this boy. Realizing that on the day of his birth, they had a perfect baby and life was just beginning, and no matter what happened in the years after that, on one blissful day that baby was fresh and new like we all are once and nothing was “wrong.”

I wouldn’t look at the poster boards of photographs of the boys as a child. I didn’t know him, had never met him. I didn’t have waterproof mascara on. I was afraid of touching that place which I wanted to avoid.

And then, fully appreciating the possibly obscene juxtaposition of our day vs. theirs, we went off to enjoy Cleveland’s refurbished downtown areas, waterfront, dinner, drinks, ice cream. Celebrating our own fifteen years of wedded bliss, and bliss is pretty much an apt description of it. Why do some get so much on their shoulders, and all that has been on my shoulders, it seems, is the sunshine that I seek so fervently this time of year?

So why write when I have no pat answer or cute meme to punctuate these thoughts? Musings. I’m just musing. And that’s how it works.

And a few less important things that really take up room in my head: I want our local weather person to stop telling me whether to eat my meal on the patio or in the air conditioning. I want her to stop instructing children what weight jacket to wear to the bus stop, and for the sake of all that is meterological I want her to stop sharing recipes. Just tell me the weather. I can make the rest of the decisions on my own.

I think BlueApron or whatever this gourmet food delivery and recipe thing is called is stupid. How hard is it to go the store and buy the six items needed for a recipe? This is another reason why people hate Americans. I know I’m right about this, and I know you probably feel the same way about some things I do, like posting yoga poses and swishing with coconut oil and still having a land-line. But these are my musings, so today I’m right.

Now, after months, I wrote something. So now I’m free to go make a playlist for my noon yoga class, because I feel like that’s fun and this is work. Why, I’m not sure, because I get paid for the yoga and not for the writing. Which is another hilarious turn of events since my intention was not to necessarily teach yoga. But two great yoga jobs were tossed into my lap like a hot potato (vs. a football, because if you toss a football into my lap I will let it fall because I think football is mostly unnecessary in my life, but a potato (hot or otherwise) I will never let pass me by) and I am completely, unexpectedly energized by teaching.

She fell in love with the song from Pink’s “The Truth About Love” album as soon as she heard it. The dramatic instrumentation, the tender, heartfelt vocal, the melody soft but strong with those minor keys of angst, building the feeling. She shared Pink’s song and the lyrics with plenty of people, because the song reminded her of profound losses: her sister’s baby, eventually her own father (…in my head I see your baby blues.)

The only detail that didn’t sit well in a song so perfect it always drew a tear and required a replay was the part about a minute being enough. What is that about? How could a minute be enough when you long for and miss someone so desperately, and then you get to be “beamed up” to see them again? A minute could never be enough.

Her dad is in her dreams, sometimes. Fairly regularly, in fact, but never the focus. His presence there is purely incidental: it is a holiday at home, so of course he is in the family room in his chair, or outside with the grandkids. She hears his voice in reply to someone’s question, catches a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye smoothing back his shock of white hair the way he always did. He’s there, as he should be, but in the dreams she is always conscious of the looming dementia. In the dramatic irony of a dream, she knows about the dementia because it has come and gone. She knows everything about it, about what’s coming, but he does not. She awakens troubled and anxious, vestiges of her sleep-self worrying that he is still driving but losing his sense of direction, still talking but sometimes seeing things. She’s afraid he will mention a puppy under the table or a bug skittering in the corner. In the dreams, she’s stressed, holding it all together and not sure what to do. But some part of her consciousness always knows it is a dream, because she knows how all of this ends. She simply can’t stop it this time, any more than she could in real life. The dream isn’t about him, so it doesn’t matter. She’s just dreaming, and he is there. Just like the pets and the kids and the occasional former co-worker or high-school classmate. Like intricate puzzles put together with a few of the wrong pieces, forced in awkwardly, dreams are.

One September night, still warm enough to sleep with the bedroom window open for the sleek purring body of her black cat to somehow relax into the tracks of the frame, she understood what it meant to be beamed up.

She dreamed, and this time it was just her and her dad. There was no context, no preface. They stood outside in the darkness facing each other, as suddenly as if they had both been dropped there like a slide from an old projector. Outside of what or where, she didn’t know, couldn’t tell. A place, a building maybe? They were a mere few strides apart, facing each other in the almost-blackness. In a fraction of a second she understood that this dream was different: he had already died, and he knew it. The dementia had come and gone again, and he knew it. And he knew that she knew it all. Revelation was instantaneous. They rushed to approach each other with arms open, no time to waste. He wore a shirt she didn’t recognize, the only thing that wasn’t familiar to her. They hugged, and her dad was once again the right size; the right height, a bit shorter than his youngest daughter in adulthood (he had introduced her around the dementia ward as “the tall one”) so her face was over his shoulder at the crook of his neck, the right density. His back and shoulders were smooth and strong and bullish, the way their dad had always been. Robust, immovable in a hug. He smelled like dad, the cloud of soap and toothpaste and shaving cream that had always breezed behind him as he rushed down the stairs, the last one to shower in a houseful of females. Somehow she could even see his tan in the darkness, sense rather than see the glossy blue-against-white of his mischievous eyes. They hugged strongly—tightly, but not hard, he was so staunch and she gripped the muscles of his back for emphasis. She knew this would be brief, and she rushed her tearful, joyful words, “oh, we love you and miss you so much!” And because she had always joked with him, added, “we don’t want to, but we do!”

He chuckled, still in the hug, unable to see each other’s faces except in mind’s eye, and said, “I know.”

Then they pulled back, still linking forearms but facing each other in this unnamed night-place. His smile was perfect, lighting up his face in its familiar jocularity, and he said to her, with just a trace of disbelief and humility, “I really love it here.”

Her heart spilled over to hear those words. She had already believed he was in a better place, THE better place, and it was what he had believed too. But to see him, feel him, smell him, and recognize the same wonder in his voice that she had heard him use in the past to describe a mountain, or a golf shot, or a talented child, or a great meal, convinced her down to her soul. She grabbed him again, sliding her arms around his shoulders and squeezing his meaty clavicles with her fingertips.

“I’m so glad,” she choked out near his ear. And she meant it. And she wanted him to know that she meant it. She was so happy for him, and she was desperate to impart the whole remaining family’s love and joy to him in what she inherently knew was a very brief opportunity. She squeezed him tighter, burying her face in him. He squeezed too.

She woke up.

Just like that, she was back in her bed at around three in the morning, her husband asleep next to her, her cat curled up and humming, the sounds of the night falling softly through the screen. The whole thing had taken no time at all. A hug, a few words. But now she could feel her dad in her arms. His voice and scent and warm, living skin lingered. She hadn’t hugged her dad that often when he was alive; she would be more inclined to chuck him on the shoulder, while he would have yanked a piece of her long hair from behind and then dodged her retaliation. She felt, for a moment, what she supposed could be called bliss.

The vestigial flavor of that dream lingers, and she deliberately goes inside her thoughts to enjoy it from time to time. She had her dad back, her real dad, tangible in her arms. And then one day, a couple of weeks later, her earbuds delivered that beloved Pink song while she was walking to one of her sister’s houses, to collect the mail or let out the dog, on a sunny, end-of-summer day. Now, it all made sense, and the lyrics didn’t leave her frustrated any more. A minute was all it took.

A conversation today with my sister prompted me to post this poem. I haven’t thought about it for a while. I wrote it in 1996, when I sat down with paper and pen and it flowed out almost in its entirety, fully formed. I definitely felt like a vehicle or a channel, because I did not have a hand in creating this–it came straight out in the pen. It was made into a framed print, a photo of which I have included here, and I no longer had it saved as a document anywhere. When I sat down today to “copy” it down, I still knew it by heart. Rachel’s spirit, or the Holy Spirit–but I humbly admit, not my own. I hope it comforts someone else out there.

Among the petrified plots, we found a few softer, rocky mounds in the grass, some marked and some not very well, and wondered if this was evidence of (relatively) recent burial. That was a haunting possibility, and I’m not ashamed to admit I gave a wider berth to those plots, walked more tenderly on the grass near them. Others, perfect rectangles bordered in stone, bore one headstone for entire families with names and dates listed one by one in chronological order. The names themselves charmed me, intoxicated as I am by all things Irish, and I once again felt like I was in one of my favorite literary works, this time maybe McCourt or James Joyce rather than Maeve Binchy’s kitchens and buses, but I was sobered by the knowledge that these names represented actual people. Characters who had walked this very ground, perhaps. Folks who had stood on the beach I had just left hours before. I don’t know you, but I acknowledge you, I thought. You may have been ornery, artistic, teenaged, or elderly, so I will spend this one moment witnessing that you were a person, completely unknown to me but now connected to me in the fragile, fleeting way in which we are all part of this same family of mankind. On a more intimate level, I take this moment to imagine you alive, because there is a reason God brought me here to this place in particular, to stand over your grave and look upon your name, silently hoping your rest is not simply peaceful, but blissful. Catherine O’Sullivan McKenna, who was preceded in death by her son Mike but not by her daughter Mary. Mary Briget Ferriter, three months old. As if each were alive briefly, standing next to me, I felt an impulse to reach out and bear witness to her life, appreciating the opportunity to have shared in it so many years later, from another dimension.

Surrounding the graves were the crumbling ruins of stone archways, walls, and tiny outbuildings. These were cold, foreboding, but softened by slick moss and ivy growing wildly. Day in and day out they stood sentry, usually with only the departed souls to see the wild yellow spring flowers cropping up in the clefts between weathered stone and any ancient mortar. What pure grace, “generous, free and totally unexpected and undeserved” that I was allowed to share this moment with them.

It is no secret that I have a special mother; she has countless admirable qualities. She is a positive role model, an open-minded and open-hearted friend, a generous spirit. She tries to be a good person, on purpose, every day. She doesn’t like to gossip, but she does like to laugh. She loves shopping and shoes and chocolate, but at the same time she is not materialistic. She is always learning, trying new things, choosing to be productive every day when she wakes up, even after losing my dad last year. She was a fun mom to us: she once brought strappy Easter sandals to school recess so that I could wear them for the rest of the day with my school uniform because I loved them so much (luckily, that was before Instagram). She yelled at us when we bickered, she tucked us in at night, she bought our favorite foods at the grocery store, and she was always willing to be the one who drove our friends around. My mom was devoted to her children, and then to her grandchildren. She is a lady. Where I came from, I have no idea. I had to teach her most of the bad words she knows.

What is most remarkable about my mom is that she was never “mothered”. Not the way that we were. She was raised by her Polish-speaking grandparents who loved her and her sister, but she missed out on the more traditional mother-child relationship and nurturing. There were no sleepovers, and no one came to her school performances. She always said that the reason she knew how to mother, how to love, cuddle, advise, and provide security for a child, was from her Aunt Dot (my Godmother). Aunt Dot has been gone for years now, but as Mother’s Day nears again, I’m reminded about all the important ways in which we are mothers to each other.

Someone took the time to be a positive influence on my mom when she was a youngster, to show her fun and discipline and family ties. Aunt Dot spent time with Dolores and Midge, which is all that they really needed. I know how lucky I am to have the mother that I do, and I’m reminded of it often by friends and acquaintances who joke that they wish they had a mom like mine. That’s because my mom has mothered other people, as well. She mothers every friend of hers, every friend of mine, and most strangers whom she comes across. Despite having the gold standard in moms myself, I can’t help but reflect on some other wonderful women who have mothered me as well, in ways large and small.

Of course my sisters were forced to mother me, since I’m the youngest in the family, but they also put forth effort of their own volition. When I bounced my first check at around 18 years old, I found a twenty-dollar bill on my dresser, not realizing until weeks later my sister Coleen had silently put it there. And Judy still doesn’t make soup at home without bringing a bowl to my house. My best friend Steph got on a plane with her kid to fly home to visit me just because I was having an emotional crisis about fifteen years ago.

But even people who might deem themselves as ancillary in my life have made contributions that have truly shaped my character. My high-school cheerleading coaches, a mother-daughter duo themselves, didn’t allow us to miss practice, ever, without the punishment of sitting out a game. They didn’t let us talk to boys when we were in uniform, and I will never forget Mrs.Toth’s advice: “when you have a problem, whatever it is, talk to your parents. No one else has only your best interests at heart.” They were parenting us, teaching us how to act appropriately. A high school teacher who had formerly been a nun signed my yearbook and made a comment about me having inner dignity. Dignity? Me? (I guess the stress was on the word inner). But it has stuck with me. She was trying to tell me something, to lead me to follow the right thoughts. My childhood pediatrician told me, plainly, “Don’t be such a brat.” My co-worker Mary Helen made a big deal of my birthday even though I was in my twenties. My seventh grade teacher has asked me one thousand times over the years when I was going to go to college (I can finally shut that one up)! My co-worker brought me a rosary, blessed by not one but two Popes, from her visit to Italy. A friend of a friend at a jewelry party sat me down and told me, when my dad first got sick, that I must take feelings out of it and do what is best for my parents, even if they got mad at my sisters and me. Another friend sat all day at the hospital with us almost twenty years ago when my sister’s baby was having heart surgery. My next-door neighbor kept a key to my house on her windowsill, knowing how often I forgot mine. Another neighbor once climbed up a weeping willow tree to get me down. An insurance company representative brought me a gift card instead of business documents when I was having a bad day. My mother-in-law sends me newspaper articles that remind her of me; her sister is constantly handing me beautiful leather goods like jackets and boots, items she bought but decided weren’t for her. The lady at the library lowered my fine to whatever I had in my purse that day. Someone, somewhere, may have lit a candle for me and I don’t even know about it.

There are countless more instances, more than I could ever commit to paper, of women taking the time and effort to mother me, and others. My own mom is not perfect (just today, we had a role-reversal conversation, in which she apparently played the sulky teen):

Me: Why do you make me yell at you?

Doe: What now?

Me: There are two newspapers on your front porch. If you leave newspapers on the front porch, someone will think you are away and break into your house. How many times have I told you that?

Doe: Many times.

Me: I tell you to pick up the papers. And you say “I will!” But then you don’t!

Doe: I will.

Still, I don’t even want to entertain the idea of what kind of person I would be if I had not been blessed with the devoted, sacrificing, savvy mom that I have. But because of her, I do understand the importance of other sources of mothering, as well. I’m not advising anyone to discipline their friends’ children, because that would undoubtedly end badly. Let’s just take care of each other when we have the opportunity to do so.

I’m not a mom, but I so appreciate the opportunity to be a Godmother, a step-mother to adults, an auntie, and soon, a granny! Thank you for letting me sing to your babies, “ride” the MRI machine with them, hold their chubby hands, check their homework…even clean up their barf. Somehow, I also managed to be the adult on duty when someone got her first period. Thanks for that. I’m not a mom, and I’m in awe of all of you who are moms. May your children not grow up to embarrass you in print.

In the summer of 2013, I was 44 years old. I feel like myself only in summer, the kind of person who is miserable for the long Cleveland months when the temperature is below, say, 64 degrees. Obviously, I live in an inhospitable climate. But during the summer months, I am alive. I carry spare shoes everywhere with me in my car to walk outside, I practice yoga in parks on tree stumps or bridges, and I don’t begrudge the ugly humidity that makes everyone look shiny and slimy, with dirty hair. I love and embrace it all. It’s easier for me, no doubt, because I am currently taking a break from employment to finally go to college full-time, so I don’t need to put on layers of spackle and hairspray, dress in a suit or Spanx, or worry about armpit stains on my blouse. I gladly parade my sweat as I walk with my ear-buds tightly placed, eating as many meals outside as possible and refusing to come indoors. These summer days, as hot and oppressive to some as the whoosh of air which accosts your face when you open an oven on Thanksgiving, are what I spend the rest of the year waiting for.

This past summer, however, my Polish/Irish/Lebanese fair-in-winter, olive-in-summer skin had barely seen the outdoors. It was the summer of Hap—that’s my dad’s name—again. Two years prior, it was also a summer of Hap, when my dad took a final rapid slide down into a well of a dementia marked by hallucinations, violence, and delusions. Since then, my mom and sisters, along with our husbands and children, had visited him daily in his residential nursing home—a nursing home made necessary by his physical strength and that of the aggressive delusions which plagued him; hallucinations of people harming us, his family, which left him no choice but to try to take down the aggressors. Our dad, our defender.

Over time, Hap grew weaker, physically and mentally, and then, the summer of Hap 2013 became about his final days. He had been hospitalized for a while with digestive issues which seem unresolvable at that point in his illness, and then he had been sent to hospice-care to transition through to death. My family members and I had seen nothing but the inside of his medical bedrooms for the better part of two months. In the end, we were grateful that his final time occurred in the summer, because his grandkids were home from school and around to visit him, and to spend time within the cocoon of the very last days we would all be together as a complete family, the finals weeks, days, hours, minutes with our beloved mentor and patriarch, our team captain.

The time was rich; irreverent, fruitful, angry, dark, food-filled, and emotional. We ate fistfuls of Honey-baked ham and packaged cookies to pass the time. We talked, recalling old memories…we sang (John Denver, poorly), we mocked each other. We chastised my dad, who was mostly unconscious and certainly unaware by this point, for keeping us cooped up all summer. We made funeral arrangements. One day in July, I slipped out into the sunshine to a waiting bench near a statue of Jesus, and I wrote out my dad’s eulogy in longhand, a speech I had been giving in my head for years, knowing always that it was incumbent upon me to try to do this remarkable man justice in words. A nun saw me from the window of my dad’s room and assumed I was sunbathing. I did not correct her. There was something perversely funny to me about tanning in the back of a Catholic institution meant for the dying.

After more than a week in hospice, I looked at my calendar one day at my dad’s bedside, and realized I had signed up for a stand-up paddleboard yoga experience on Lake Erie for the next day. I’m sure it had seemed like a grand idea at the time, a group decision with a couple of yoga friends. The daughter my dad had known would never have attempted this—I was not an athlete by any means, spending much of my life a little overweight and a lot under-exercised. I was not a strong swimmer, if you could call me a swimmer at all, and I don’t know if you could. I may or may not be able to keep my head above water and make some progress in a time of trouble on water, but I’m not certain the resulting action could accurately be labeled “swimming.” Yoga was the only exercise I did, and even that was the result of my recent search for peace during my dad’s illness, not any physical prowess. I also have a healthy fear of large bodies of water, and no confidence in my ability to perform this scheduled outing. It was decidedly out of my comfort zone.

I texted my yoga-friend Jenny, because the excursion had already been paid for, and I hoped that she could find someone to take my place and enjoy the experience. But as the day went on, I felt a nagging pull at my consciousness to consider leaving my dying father’s bedside for a few hours to do something completely out of the ordinary. I was scared, not only of being able to navigate the actual physical activity, but that after all of these days and nights spent in this room, my dad might slip away during the one time I was absent. To be truthful, I also feared the impression it would leave with others: my family, the nurses, the general “people” who would undoubtedly ask, “what kind of daughter would leave her dying father’s bedside to go play watersports on a summer evening?”

I think it was that final bit, though, that actually convinced me. My dad, a man of many unique and wonderful characteristics, was most known for walking his own path, no matter what anyone thought. He sold investments to wealthy clients wearing a Cleveland Indians tee-shirt (he was about to be buried in one, too). He drove goofy vehicles which had personality (most recently a cobalt-blue turbo-charged Subaru) no matter how luxurious a car he could actually afford, and he took his wife (our mother) on all of his business trips because he wanted her to see the world with him. If he knew that I was bailing out on something I’d committed to simply because I was afraid of how I would look to other people, he would shake his head at me. It began to occur to me that this activity could actually be a tribute to my dad, that he would get me through it and inspire me to appreciate the beauty and accomplishment and camaraderie of what I was about to undertake.

I had a talk first with Paula, the wonderful hospice nurse who had been taking care of my dad every weekday of his hospice stay. She was a friend by then, it being such an intense time for sharing family stories and feelings with intimate strangers. She also knew my dad, his physical condition, very well. It had started to deteriorate more rapidly, and we knew the end was nearer than it had been. I asked, “Paula, what should I do? If I have a thing to do tonight, do you think it’s okay for me to leave to do it? Or is he close?”

Paula (who by the way, my dad would have absolutely loved and would have probably nicknamed something like “Scrappy” because she was small but fierce), looked towards my dad’s bed, looked back at me, and repeated both actions. Then she said, “You know him. What would he tell you to do?” Well played, Paula. And right on. So, with the confidence born from the knowledge that nothing else can possibly even matter when you’re about to lose someone forever, I walked out of my dad’s room that evening, not knowing if I would see him again alive. Of course, as I grasped his hand and kissed him goodbye, I said (as I always did), “See ya tomorrow!” But I felt like something had changed. Something bigger was happening, and it almost felt as if my dad had already left that body.

Incidentally, one of the most valuable things about hospice for us was the way that it gave us our dad back, restored to his old self in a way. The dementia had been so grueling, and his perceptions and statements so out of character, that once he was debilitated enough that he could no longer speak, we were left with his beautiful blue eyes (for the first day or two, until he became semi-conscious at best) and the feeling that he had been delivered from dementia, and instead lay dying here as his former self, in his right mind. The hospice caregivers changed his bedding every day before we even arrived, shaved him, brushed his teeth, washed his hair, made him look like he was in his own bed at home, no longer hooked up to IV’s or tubes. So when I leaned over him that day, he smelled of shaving cream, toothpaste, and soap, just the way I remembered him. I carried that smell with me as I drove away, recalling how it would come down the stairs ahead of him on Sundays, when he was the last one ready as the rest of us waited to leave for church. A man with a wife and three daughters is last in line for a shower.

The day was one of the hottest that July, maybe in the nineties. Despite that, I drove to the lake with my windows and sunroof open, drinking in the moist heat and the dangerous feeling that I was somewhere I was not supposed to be. I felt fragile, and grateful that the friends I was about to meet for this excursion were not close friends yet. They were women around my age, with similar interests and problems, compassionate and supportive, but I knew they would not ask me questions, hug me too tightly or lingeringly, or ask if I was okay. They knew, probably better than I, what I was there for that day and the restorative power it might have over me. They had each already buried a parent. Their support was silent, but loud. The remaining participants were strangers. It was a welcome feeling to just be an anonymous body as we all schlepped the cumbersome paddleboards off of a trailer and toward the Great-Lake Erie. Only my two yoga friends knew that I was in a liminal space, “the one whose father is actively dying.” But we couldn’t concentrate on that: we had to worry about getting up, and then staying up, on the boards bobbing under us on the water inside the break wall of the lake.

Once we were all assembled and following the leader, I noticed bystanders watching from shore. Looking through their eyes, I realized that we looked fierce, like models on a women’s magazine, unaware of our ages and instead feeling like lithe, strong teenagers. We had on an assortment of swimsuits, board shorts, yoga clothes. No cell phones, no watches, just sweaty hair up in ponytails because all of us still wear it long (I heard somewhere that if a woman can remember Gerald Ford being President, she is too old to wear a ponytail). We attentively listened to Deanna, our instructor, who seemed to embody light: blonde hair, bronzed skin, with a strong and casual manner, competent. We were in good hands. We had already developed some confidence in our strength through yoga, these friends and I, but we were all shy about our abilities on this giant, often angry lake. There was little conversation, only concentration, bodies held at attention, and deliberate motion.

As we traveled up the shoreline, past indescribably unique and lovely homes and a bit away from the safety of the shore, Deanna led us through yoga poses. Yoga inherently employs “pratyahara,” the act of suspending the senses, of coming inside…so while there was a handful of us sprawled out some yards from each other, going through the same motions, we each practiced in isolation. I could feel my friends Jenny and Beth near me, all of us supporting each other with our presence, with our intention, and our breath, sending waves of friendship out from our hearts even as we were fighting hard to maintain various balances on a floating board. We generated immediate and copious sweat, which ran down not just our faces but our entire bodies, pooling in our bellies when we lay on our backs, making our hands slippery when we stood inverted in downward dog. We were ruddy, our ribcages heaving with exertion, slow, steady exertion. It was like being squeezed out, a sponge from a pail of water. Loose hairs frizzed around our faces or stuck to our temples. Any remnants of old mascara had long since smeared away.

I opened my eyes and squinted around me, the glare of the fiery evening sun slapping the dark glassy water, the sky so bright my friends were rendered just silhouettes to me. My eyes burned from the salty brine of sweat, wind, and emotion. It occurred to me that my dad was just such a silhouette now, too. I suddenly felt positively impervious to any attack, ten feet tall and bulletproof. I was aware of my upper arms and shoulders rippling in smooth strength as my paddle dipped into the water, pushing my hips forward, potent. I was as strong as I had ever been, as beautiful as I would ever be, and as capable as any other person on the planet. Without warning, I sensed my dad’s presence so strongly around me that I said aloud to my friends, “I know now that there is absolutely no place else on earth that I should be at this moment then here on this lake with you.”

I wondered if this sudden peace and feeling of connection with my dad meant that he was slipping away, even as I was gliding along in this moment of bliss. I contemplated what I would feel like if my dad took his last breath while I was on this lake, while my mom and sisters sat close and held his hands and spoke soft words to him. I knew in that moment that it would be perfectly correct if that’s the way it happened. My inner voice reminded me that I was the one who lived next door to my parents, I was the one who worked with them for fifteen years. Maybe it would be a wonderful gift to my sisters for them to finally have as much of a portion of my dad as I had always been so spoiled to have. If he passed away in my absence, I would not regret my decision to choose this spiritual experience of my dad on this lake.

At the end of our practice, as we drifted, lying on our backs on the paddleboards with the cinnamon-hot July sun setting behind us, I closed my eyes and felt buoyant in mind and spirit. This body of mine, this body of water, and this body of friends and family was stable and certain. This mighty lake may as well have been the very palm of my dad’s hand, and the deep, wide well of his heart. I relaxed. I thought of my dad’s broad, brown hands and how they had held me up on countless summer vacations, held me by my ribs in oceans and hotel pools, tossing and playing with his kids like toys. We were never afraid. He always caught us, held us aloft. He always would. The palm of my dad’s hand, the palm of our Father’s hand. More gargantuan and mighty than this lake, but tender, both.

Swirling, floating, feeling more accomplished than the accomplishment merited, I sensed rather than saw the sun melt low and hot into the horizon, and wondered without fear or anxiety if my dad’s light had just dipped below the surface of this life. I celebrated Savasana, the yoga pose of relaxation, drifting on a trembling sunset, feeling and tasting hot, wet salt on my face, sweat mixing with healing tears, as welcome as they were valuable, flowing unchecked. I never felt closer to my dad than at that moment; I’d never loved or appreciated him more.